“Losing My Fear of Religion” by Mubarak Dahir, AlterNet.org, September 16, 2005, story 20585.
“The Case Against Marriage” by James Withers, New York Blade, September 30, 2005.
“Sex and Spirituality” by Deborah Emin, Gay City News, 27 October – 2 November, 2005.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Here’s the pragmatic assessment of gay activist/writer Mubarak Dahir: “Like many gay men and lesbians, for the longest time I looked at religion as an enemy of our civil rights movement. But, even as an atheist, I have come to believe that if we continue to take the antagonist approach to religion, we will inevitably come out on the losing end. In America, for all our declarations of being a secular society, religion is deeply ingrained in our culture.”
Dahir was reared by a Muslim father from whom he heard that all religions were “essentially the same” and a mother for whom the “strict and unbending ways of [her background with the] Southern Baptists were enough to turn [her], from an early age, into a life-long, fervent non-believer.” He says he’s “rather easily” adopted his mother’s view – that all religions are “fairy tales.”
Nonetheless, he urges that the gay and lesbian civil rights movement stop viewing “religious people” as the enemy. He reasons that the movement should “appeal to the very things in religion that give believers their strength: their sense of morality and right from wrong.” He calls on his fellow activists “to help show good Americans who believe in right and wrong, based largely on their concept of God, that supporting gay rights isn’t a contradiction of their religious beliefs. Indeed,” he says, “if we approach it in the right way, we can help them discover that supporting gay and lesbian rights is, in fact, a morally just thing to do.”
To illustrate this, he reports on two “real-life transformations” from his own personal experience. One is Bridget’s. She is a college friend, “a devout Catholic” who holds that divorce and abortion are wrong. She is also “an ardent supporter of gay rights. Why? She believes her religion demands it [as] a matter of fairness.” This sense of fairness, of course, is not unrelated to her opposition to abortion. Dahir’s other transformation, which “was more difficult,” he says, is that of Susan, a co-worker. Susan is “a born-again Christian … incredibly conservative and initially willing to deny gays and lesbians civil rights, based on her religious beliefs. But,” he emphasizes, “she was not the monster the religious right is often painted as.” Susan is, he says, “an intelligent, college-educated woman, [who] made surprising leaps of faith, quite literally, in her position on gay rights. Eventually, she came to believe that her born-again God wasn’t asking her to unduly discriminate against gays and lesbians. In fact, he probably required her to support them, she concluded.”
Dahir observes that these two good Christian friends of his now support gay rights “because of their religious beliefs, not in spite of them.” He concludes: “I cannot believe that Bridget and Susan are alone.”
And they’re not. There are conservative Christians who support civil rights and even marriage for gay people – as the early Christians rescued discarded babies left to die and later introduced hospitals, fought the slave trade, opened education to women, and shared in the 1960s civil rights movement.
Will other activists heed Dahir’s good counsel? Sadly, probably not many will. Somewhat understandably, too many are too enmeshed in a hostile, illiterate anti-Christian secularism to hear even another secularist’s call to good sense.
Good sense is lacking – albeit proudly lacking – in the views of the “queer theorists” quoted by reporter James Withers in a New York GLBT weekly. He calls them “the marriage malcontents” and grants: “such vitriol from the radical left might be obligatory and expected.”
Clearly obligatory is the rant of “subversive” drag activist Matt Bernstein Sycamore (aka Mattilda): “Nothing could be more depressing than the spectacle of this gay marriage charade. …[It] erases decades of queer struggle to make transformative ways of making and loving. … We need to think bigger than that. We need to challenge the systems of oppressions and build something more deviant, devious, and devastating.” Joseph DeFilippis of Queers for Economic Justice gripes that the marriage movement is for “privileged white folk of some financial means.” He accuses them of having “hijacked the movement. For queer people who are poor, or people of color, marriage is not the thing that is going to change their lives.” In arguing this way, he not only unintentionally points up the good sense link between financial betterment and the stability of marriage but reveals his ignorance of or contempt for all the sociological research that links poverty and violence and sexual relationships without benefit of marriage. And recent research from UCLA finds that the 39 percent of same-sex couples who are rearing children have an average household income 15 percent below that of heterosexual couples who are rearing children.
According to “Sluts & Goddesses” video star Barbara Carrellas, now offering her services as a “metaphysical pleasure activist” to anyone turning to “sex as a spiritual path,” the same-sex marriage movement is “assimilationist.” In judgmental queer theory, that’s probably the epitome of condemnation. She attests: “I identify as queer. I don’t identify as LGBT anymore.” She sneers: “Everybody wants three kids and a mini-van.”
And, of course, the queer theorists in academia jump onto the anti-marriage bandwagon. To Lisa Duggan, on New York University’s faculty and writing a book about “the end of marriage,” the same-sex marriage movement is undemocratic: “It’s not exactly like everyone got together and decided to make it an issue.”
Conversing on “sex and spirituality” with Brad Gooch and Donna Minkowitz, Elim is told that their writing projects “generated little enthusiasm or support within their own [GLBT] circles.” For his Godtalk, Gooch interviewed Deepak Chopra, Trappist monks, Moslems, and Promise Keepers. His friends were indifferent about his quest. For her book, subtitled “What my encounters with the Right taught me about sex, God and fury,” Minkowitz went to Promise Keepers rallies disguised as a teenage boy. Her friends were incredulous and anxious about her quest.
Neither writer seems to have met a Paul, “resolved to know nothing among [them] but Christ crucified.” In November’s Christianity Today, Philip Yancey reflects on fears and anger among his gay Christian and secular friends when it comes to evangelicals. He asks: “What have we evangelicals done to make Good News – the very meaning of the word evangelical – sound like such a threat?” What indeed!